


Yetziat Maqom haTov

by tangleofrainbows



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: Gen, Judaism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:46:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23652544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tangleofrainbows/pseuds/tangleofrainbows
Summary: Anshel is ready to leave the Good Place, and then he decides he wants to pray one more time before he goes. Unfortunately, he's Jewish, and that means that he needs a minyan first.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 20





	Yetziat Maqom haTov

**Author's Note:**

> I was watching the Good Place and kept having a lot of Feelings about what it would mean to practice Judaism in that world, and especially in the Good Place of the last few episodes. And then this fic started Intrusive Thought-ing its way into my brain and wouldn't leave until I wrote it down. It is very strange and honestly only tangentially related to the TV show; all of the characters other than Janet are my own creation. Happy last few days of Pesaḥ?

The Good Place was not what Anshel had expected from Olam haBa.

To be fair, Anshel had spent little of his time on Earth seriously considering what Olam haBa would be like, so it wasn’t like he had many expectations to begin with, but even so.

He had made shoes when he was on Earth. Good shoes, sturdy shoes, dependable shoes. The kind of shoes you could count on to carry you for many miles in bitter weather and uncertain terrain. Anshel the Shoemaker, they had called him, those who knew him, and they recommended his work whenever anyone asked for a cobbler. It was a quiet life, an unremarkable life.

Just about the most exciting thing in it was once, when a great posek came to town, and Anshel went to listen to him expound his teachings. The posek was a funny little man, wizened and bent beyond his years, and Anshel had not found his intricate sophistries worth the time they took to express, but Anshel’s son, little Shmu’el, had apparently thought otherwise and became enchanted, like one under a magic spell. They fought about it bitterly, father and son, until one day Shmu’el ran off to study, with that posek or some other, in Vilnius, Anshel heard, and then far off, elsewhere — the Holy Blessed One only knew where. Anshel kept on making shoes.

He had tried to live a good life. He provided for his family, not extravagantly, but enough. He made sure not a week went by but there was laughter on the lips of his Goldele, his wife. He kept the Sabbath, mostly, as best he could. He waited, every day, for the arrival of moshiaḥ, tho he tarried, tarried, tarried.

He died, unpoetically, of plague when he could have had many years left in his life. At the time, perhaps, he resented the loss, but once Janet informed him of what the twentieth century would bring to his little shtetl, he happily concluded that, after all, it had all been for the best and it couldn’t possibly have turned out any differently in the end.

* * *

“So this is Olam haBa!”, he said, when he had finally made it to the Good Place.

“Yes,”, Janet replied. “And no. The Good Place doesn’t correspond exactly with the afterlife setup in any Earth religion, although each Earth religion does preach certain true aspects of it. Here, let me show you around!”

Anshel tried, really he did. But the Good Place baffled him. It had been a joy, of course, to be reunited with Goldele, to embrace Shmu’el again — who had gone off to be a rebbe in America, of all outlandish places! — and to light the shabbos candles as a family once more. It was wonderful to dance with the Torah in the streets and not worry that the goyim would start a pogrom. But the Good Place, in the end, had little need for a man like Anshel, a man whose skill was making shoes. He enjoyed shoemaking, yes, and here he could do so at his leisure, but on Earth he had made shoes because people _needed_ someone to make shoes or else they would all go around barefoot. Here, if he did not make shoes, and if no one else made shoes, Janet would provide them, no one would want for protection for their feet. And if people did not need the labor of his hands, was there really any point to it, in the end?

He had gone to Jerusalem, to celebrate Pesaḥ at the Second Temple. How could he not? And yes, yes, of course, it was magnificent, but… In the end, Jerusalem was just a place. And the business with the sacrificing animals… He couldn’t help but feel that it was better, actually, not to do that sort of thing. Better just to pray, and let that be enough to reach haShem. He went back to his neighborhood.

In truth, although he did not know this, there were many souls like Anshel. People who lived lives with few loose ends on Earth, and who found little in the Good Place to hold them there. He felt a great peace wash over him, a stillness that reached down to the marrow of his bones. The quivering dance of atoms that had kept him engaged with the world, one accumulation of matter inextricably interwoven with all others in a deft tapestry of infinite dimensions, simply ended one day, and he detached from his surroundings, sinking down along some axis at right angles to reality to become embedded in a deeper, unmoving substrate while everything around him spun on. He said his goodbyes to his family, properly this time. He took one last look around the Good Place neighborhood he had called, however briefly, home.

“I am ready.”, he said.

“OK then,”, Janet said. “follow me. It’s not a long walk.”

And indeed, it wasn’t. They passed it mostly in silence. This Janet was one of the younger ones, and had only taken a few souls to the door so far, but she was already getting the sense that most of them would go this way. That was fine. She enjoyed conversation, enjoyed telling people facts about the world and explaining its inner workings, but there was something nice about silence, too, about being silent with another consciousness, not in her void, but out and about, in the world at large. There was an intimacy to it, a tenderness. She wasn’t sure she had the words for it. She would find them someday.

“OK, we’re here.” She indicated the door. “Take all the time you need.”

“And when I’m ready, I just…?”

“You just step thru there, yes.”

Anshel paused. “Actually, I think there is something… If I wanted to wait for something, I could do that, yes?”

“You don’t have to wait; I can fetch you anything you require.”

“Ah, not, I think, this.”

“What do you want, Anshel?”

He told her.

“Oh. Yes. That is not something I can summon. I can maybe— I mean I might be able to—”

“It is all right!”, he cut her off. “As long as it is allowed for me to wait here, I can wait. It is a nice clearing, this clearing. It is a good place to wait.”

The silence stretched between them. “This is slightly awkward,”, Janet began, “but—”

“You do not need to wait with me, friendly sheydele. Go about your affairs.”

“I’m not a sheyde.” _Bing_.

And so Anshel waited alone.

* * *

He watched many souls go thru the door. He did not count them, or try to stop them, or ask any of them for what he needed. For what he needed, he would not have to ask. At long last (he did not know how long; he had never got the knack for counting Bearimys), a soul rolled up in a power chair, one with hair dyed a dazzling shock of neon pink. Zie stopped when zie saw Anshel.

“Hello, is everything all right?”

“Ah, yes, everything is fine, I am simply waiting.”

“Is there anything in particular you are waiting . . . for?”

On Earth, Anshel would likely have snapped that it was none of this stranger’s business, but this impulse had been trained out of him long since and so he merely replied, “I am a Jew, young friend, and I am waiting for a minyan so I can pray one last time before I go.”

“Oh!” The stranger’s face brightened. Zie reached into a bag tucked away in hir wheelchair and pulled out a kippah as fluorescently orange as hir hair was pink. “Shalom l’kha! May I join you?”

It was the first surprise Anshel had felt in a very long time.

“Are you sure? I don’t mean to delay you if you are ready to depart…”

“Don’t be silly!”, the stranger said, wheeling over to sit next to Anshel. “The door’s not an avocado, it’s not going to go bad. I’m happy to wait here and pray with you. I’m Etz.” Zie held out a hand to shake.

“Etz? Anshel.”

“A pleasure! How have you been passing the time?”

“I have been . . . mostly sitting and letting my thoughts wander. I do not know what the great peace is like for you, but for me I find I do not need to do much of anything to make the time pass; it does that of its own accord.”

“No, yeah, _super_ fair,”, Etz agreed, “but I had a lot of fun with the Daf down on Earth if you wanted to go through that together.”

“The Daf?”

“Oh, of course! It only started in the 1920s. It’s this thing where you go thru the whole Talmud one page a day every day, with the whole Jewish world reading it in synch. I’m not sure where they are in the cycle down on Earth—”

“Those on Earth participating in the eighteenth Daf Yomi cycle”, Etz’s Janet cut in, “Are currently in Masekhet Kiddushin, Daf—”

“Yes, thank you Janet!”, Etz cut her off. “ _As I was saying_. I’m not sure where they are in the cycle down on Earth, so why don’t we start at the beginning? Berakhos is a fun one, especially if you haven’t read any Talmud before.”

Anshel considered this. “This is a generous offer, but I am afraid I have never been a man of great learning. I would not want to bore you with my inevitable confusion…”

“Don’t be silly! Here, look—” Etz wheeled about to face Janet. “Hey Janet, could we have a couple hard copies of Berakhos from the Babylonian Talmud?”

_Bing_.

“Here you go. This is the one has your notes from RRC, Etz, and Anshel, this one has a Yiddish translation for you to follow along with.”

Anshel did not know what the RRC was, and the emotion that flashed across Etz’s face was gone almost as soon as it appeared, but when zie thanked Janet, hir voice was thick with a feeling Anshel knew well: It was the same feeling he had felt on seeing Shmu’el again in this strange and unexpected afterlife, a buried pain that time had dulled on Earth — a loss reconciled with the steady leaden mantra that there was nothing to be done but put it out of mind — blossoming suddenly back to the surface with the unimaginable hope that true healing might here, actually, be at hand.

But Etz’s voice was steady as zie flipped open the cover to show Anshel what zie had had in mind. “Yeah, so if you look, you see how it starts on page 2? That’s because no matter what, no matter where you come from, everybody comes to the Talmud with the richness of their life, and all of the knowledge that they’ve accrued in that life. No one starts totally from nothing, and everyone’s experience is an important part of bringing out the full meaning of the text. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a ton of formal education, this text is meant for you.”

Still, Anshel hesitated.

“Hey, look, you don’t have to stick with it if you don’t want. I know a lot of people who tried it and ducked out partway thru, and I promise I won’t be upset or anything if you decide this isn’t your thing. But give it a shot, hey? Might as well, right? It’s the Good Place, and we’ve got nothing but time. What do you say?”

Anshel considered. The sun beamed down thru the trees. Somewhere, a bird sang eagerly in the mellow air. In this place, this Good Place, where time didn’t work right and nothing was ever truly urgent, because it was never too late for anything, the world waited. For how long, who could say? Etz was ready to go thru the door; boredom was no longer in hir emotional lexicon. Janet was deriving a proof that there would always be pairs of prime numbers with only one even number between them no matter how high you went, again, for fun. Finally, perhaps after seconds, or perhaps after many years, Anshel decided. “Well, I suppose it couldn’t hurt to try.”

“Excellent! Janet, that should be all we need for now. Unless a whole bunch of Jews come thru all at once, we’ll call you once we’re ready to start Shabbos in a couple months.”

_Bing_.

“Cool. So, Berakhos starts with a discussion of when to say the Sh’ma…”

* * *

They were around halfway thru Shabbos (the second time around — Etz was teaching Anshel Aramaic, and Anshel was teaching hir Yiddish; progress was slow on both fronts) when there came the sound of laughter thru the trees. This was not that unusual — the souls that passed were often in good spirits, and occasionally joked with the Janets that ferried them thru the final door — but it was unusual to see three figures arrive in the clearing all at once. For their part, the newcomers seemed just as surprised to see Etz and Anshel.

“Oh! Is there a line?”, one of them asked.

“Not quite,”, the Janet began, before Etz interrupted.

“We’re waiting for a minyan. You can go right on thru!” The two of them had become quite practiced at giving this explanation by now, to the point that it was essentially automatic.

“What if we want to wait with you?” Etz and Anshel looked up from their studying in earnest then.

“Wait, Heather, are you sure?”, a second one of the three newcomers asked the first.

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to, love,”, said Heather, “but I’d like to help them out. I’ll wait with you.” And she sat down decisively on the log bench across from Etz and Anshel, extending a perfectly manicured hand to shake, her black skin warm in the burnished sunlight. “Heather Adams. Formerly of Pittsburgh. I’ll let these two make their own introductions once they decide whether or not they’re staying.”

The other two — Rebecca Cohen and Michal Rodriguez, as it turned out — decided to stay as well, tho it was never much of a question, really. Heather, Rebecca, and Michal had been a triad for decades down on Earth (“They both converted for me, can you believe it?”, Heather had said, laughing as she told the story. It was her laugh, rich and sparkling, that they had heard carrying thru the trees.), and had stayed together for all of their Bearimys in the Good Place. Once Heather had decided to stay, there was no way the others would pass on without her. So now there were five of them, waiting without impatience, filling the clearing with laughter, stories, study, and shared silence.

* * *

Shmu’el was the sixth.

Janet — the same Janet who had brought Anshel in the first place, for they had been in the same Good Place neighborhood, after all — had filled him in on the situation on the walk from the village to the doorway, but the moment of recognition was still, well, a moment.

Heather was in the middle of regaling the group with a story from her years as a chef down on Earth when he arrived.

“Papa.”

“Shmu’el.”

There was a pause as they held their places at opposite sides of the clearing, Shmu’el standing and Anshel sitting, and then Anshel rose and threw out his arms.

“Come here, my son. Everyone, this is my son, my Shmu’el! The one who went off to become a rebbe in America! Look how well he has grown and how lightly he carries his years!” And indeed, Shmu’el had chosen to keep the body he had had when he died, hale and hearty, hair grey and wild, beard reaching down well past the middle of his chest.

“So old man! It looks like your final goodbye back at our village was not so final after all, eh?”, Shmu’el said, after they embraced.

“No, I suppose not! Janet has told you we are waiting for a minyan?”

“Yes, she told me everything on the way over.”

“What a good little sheydele!”

“Again, I am not a sheyde.” Janet, from across the clearing.

“I don’t suppose you would do the honor of leading us once we have the other four to fill out our minyan?”

“We’ll see, Papa. I retired for a reason, down on Earth. We can all decide together, as a minyan, once we are all gathered.”

And so there were six of them, and they waited.

* * *

With the addition of a sybaritic farmhand who had been slaughtered by Crusaders, a cybernetic rabbi from the 23rd century, and a flamboyantly homosexual poet from the Iberian peninsula, their number was soon nine, and for a while it seemed likely that their minyan was almost at hand, but then the Bearimys went by and by and no tenth showed up.

The heart of the matter was that Judaism was a tricky thing to keep going in the Good Place. Right away, there were logistical barriers: How do you calculate when Rosh haShanah is supposed to be when the seasons don’t change and a Jeremy Bearimy has no relation to the length of a year, solar, lunar, or otherwise? What does it mean to call new months by the moon when the moon might be new or full for weeks at a time with no transitions in between? Even keeping shabbat, that great and holy bastion of Jewish observance, was no small matter with the wrinkles and whorls of time in the Good Place — marking out every seventh day was no small feat when Tuesday sometimes happened before Monday and Wednesday sometimes got stuck on loop for a while in a little bubble disconnected from the rest of the timeline. Many had, of course, responded by declaring the Good Place to be Olam haBa, suspending all festivals (except Purim, of course, altho when it was to be observed was a matter of some controversy), and observing every day as shabbat (which had, in turn, produced a flurry of debate about what restrictions applied — was it permissible to ask Janet for things at all if every day counted as shabbat? — a debate that the Good Place architects had been wholly unprepared to answer (their unpreparedness had, of course, caused further division about whether the Good Place could truly be considered Olam haBa (surely those in charge of Olam haBa would have a better grasp of the fundamentals of halakha?), but we are already rather off track here, and a full explication of the ultimate development of afterlife Judaism in all its complexities will simply have to wait for another time.).), a solution that worked well enough in theory, but left those Jews whose practice was more deeply rooted in the rhythms of familial and cultural observance than in the strictures of theology with little to hang on to.

In truth, however, these practical hurdles were often just a cover for deeper disjuncts. While Judaism was perhaps hit less hard than, say, certain Protestant denominations by the revelation of the true workings of the afterlife, even here this grand reduction in the amount of deep mystery in the world rather took the wind out of many people’s sails. In a land of material abundance, a land free of injustice anywhere, a land where one could spend all one’s days surrounded by a community of dearly beloved fellow beings pursuing only the activities that most deeply nourished one’s soul, a land where everyone knew already how to be good, knew already how to confront the worst parts of one’s self, struggle with them, and change them for the better, what was there to write a drash about? When every moment is suffused with the Presence of G-d, small wonder that many found they no longer needed dedicated time in shul in the way that they had on Earth. Habit can only get you so far.

Those who stayed, broadly speaking, largely fell into two camps. First there were those — like Anshel, Shmu’el, and the cybernetic rabbi — whose faith in G-d was unshakable and who were simply not bothered by the discrepancy between the Good Place as it was an Olam haBa as they had expected it to be — haShem’s designs had been mysterious and hidden during their time on Earth; why should things be any different after death? And second there were those — like Heather, Etz, and the poet — who never really thought that G-d had much of anything to do with anything in the first place and went right on practicing as they always had in gleeful defiance of their changed surroundings — Judaism’s embrace of absurdity had always been a source of delight for them; why abandon that just because they were waving palm fronds from beyond the grave?

But outside of these camps, many drifted away from practice, and found that when they were ready to pass on from the Good Place, they had no desire to join a minyan and pray again for the first time in eternities. And most of those who did continue their practice in the Good Place prayed for the last time with their neighborhood communities before leaving for the final door, and it felt like a betrayal of that community, somehow, to then pray again with a different minyan of largely strangers.

No matter. On Earth, of course, this would have been a catastrophe, and the nine at the final door would long since have fallen into strife and abandoned their long, patient vigil. Even in their neighborhoods, they would have grown impatient and sought some other solution. But they were, each of them, ready to go thru the gate; their hearts had long since stopped filling with emotions such as that. Etz suggested asking Janet for a Torah scroll at one point, but they all decided that they would rather have a genuine person. It was not a problem. They had nothing but time.

Since no one ever came back from the door, none of the souls elsewhere in the Good Place knew about their vigil. But the Janets did. They talked about it sometimes, in their voids, flashes of electricity arcing in an instant across their infinite transdimensional nothings. The humans kept _doing things_ , things like this, things that didn’t really make sense. Strange things, tender things, beautiful things. Petty little acts of irrational friendship, charity, and grace. The Janets collected them and shared them with one another. They traded them like rare and precious stones, given away freely so others could rejoice in the marvel of their luster.

Anshel’s Janet made a request. It was an unusual request, but it was one the other Janets ultimately decided to honor. She wanted to be the one to bring the tenth soul to complete their minyan. She told herself, and the other Janets, that it was because she was, ultimately, responsible for bringing Anshel thru the door, and he had asked for a minyan, something that, so far, she had not been able to give him. It was her job to give people things. She didn’t like not being able to do her job. She didn’t like it at all. So whenever another Jew was ready to go thru the door, and was open to praying first, but hadn’t prayed in their own neighborhood before setting out, Anshel’s Janet wanted to be the one to lead them there.

* * *

It was twilight, or a little after. The first stars were beginning to wink their way over the treetops. The group was silent, as they often were these days, a friendly, restful silence that could stretch for weeks or even months at a time. They were simply waiting, with perfect faith, for an ordinary Jew to arrive, that they might pray together one last time. And tho that Jew might tarry, still, they knew that one day, they would arrive.

There was the faintest rustle of wind, a quiet sigh, and then a shy voice from the edge of the clearing.

“Um. Hi. Janet tells me you need one more person to form a minyan?” The newcomer was pale and ghostly in the gathering shadows, their skin dotted with feathers here and there, as tho they had spent many Bearimys in the form of a bird, and the transformation back to human hadn’t fully taken hold.

“Yes.”, Anshel said simply. “We have been waiting for quite some time now. We are glad to have you join us.” Altho neither of them would ever know it, this newcomer was the last of Anshel’s children’s children’s children, down at the very end of his family tree.

“Here,”, Heather said, “Make yourself comfortable. We’ll pray in the morning and then move on.”

The newcomer settled down. Janet hesitated at the edge of the group. “Is there anything else you need? Anshel? Etz? Any of you?”

Anshel gauged the group’s reactions. “No, sheydele, thank you. We will pray in the morning and then we will trouble you no more.”

“I’m not a sheyde. And really, it’s no trouble. I’m here to help.”

“And you have been very helpful. Thank you.”

“Yes. Of course.” For a moment, it seemed like there was something else she wanted to say, but then she merely nodded.

_Bing_.

* * *

Would it be wishful thinking to say that the sunlight the next morning was especially rich, the dew especially bright? Would it be wrong to imagine that the birds sang more beautifully on that morning than they had on any other as that ragtag minyan started to pray? Perhaps. Let us say it anyway. It was a beautiful morning, even by Good Place standards. More than that: It was a perfect morning, the most glorious morning anyone could have asked for, could have dreamed of. The kind of morning you only get once, if you’re lucky, and then must cherish for as long as you can hold the memory dear.

They prayed the shabbos liturgy. Not because they all agreed that every day must be shabbos in the Good Place or because any of them had been carefully counting sevens across the loops and whorls of the Jeremy Bearimys, but just because it felt like the right thing to do. Theirs was an ad-hoc rite, not known to any movement here on Earth. They welcomed the morning, giving thanks for the ground that supported them, the clothes on their bodies, the senses with which they perceived the richness of creation. They sang psalms of sorrow, psalms of liberation, psalms of praise. They blessed the dawn, the radiant lights of heaven that had wheeled above and around them for so long in the vast expanse of G-d’s sky. They blessed love, infinite and boundless, evident in teachings and debates and communities and friendships and families.

They listened. They opened their hearts to the unity of creation, accepted the incomprehensibility of a world fashioned beyond human understanding and gave themselves over to its service, gave themselves over with their bodies, with their breath, with everything they had. They accepted the implications of this, the obligations to each other, to the world. They sang for joy that injustice is not forever, that liberation is possible even from the direst straights.

They gave voice to the silent things lodged deep within them, the things that live beyond what words can capture. They offered them up in the Presence of G-d and knew that they would be acceptable. They prayed for peace, limitless, boundless peace, for everyone, everywhere, without limit, without end.

Their Torah service was not like any they had done while still alive. They had new hearts, hearts as different from ours as flesh is from stone, and knowledge of G-d filled them as waters fill the sea. Verses tumbled forth from their mouths in a glorious cacophony of overlapping trop, yet every word was perfect, every word understood. _Yes_ , they thought, each in their own way, with their own understanding, _it’s like that_.

They prayed again in silence. For some, it was the first musaf they had ever done. For others, it was a deep familiar comfort.

They took upon themselves the task of completing creation, of returning to the fabric of the universe and healing it, unifying it, merging their energy with the energy of G-d, or whatever awaited them beyond the final door.

They said Kaddish, a new Kaddish, for themselves, for everyone they had loved, for this aching, beautiful world. They blessed the name of the L-rd in the Good Place, on Earth, and wherever else the name might be found. They prayed for life. They prayed for peace. They said amen.

And then, one by one, filled with the deepest of tranquilities, they went thru the door and dissolved into light.

* * *

_Some time later._

It was a busy Elul for Rabbi Ogawa. (She did not know this, and it would not mean anything to her if she did, but she was in Anshel’s old neighborhood, in his very house, in fact. Would it have pleased him to see his shoemaker’s workbench refashioned into a rabbi’s study and covered everywhere with papers and books, computers and printer paper? We will never know.)

Elul was always busy, of course, even in the Good Place, but this one was especially so. She had been invited to present a Reconstructionist perspective on the halakhot of polyamory at the upcoming meeting of the Inter-Movement Good Place Rabbinic Working Group (the topic was being hotly discussed at the moment given the sheer number of people who, having re-married after the death of their first spouse, suddenly found themselves with multiple partners and many questions), and while the conference had been scheduled in Sh’vat, a Bearimy irregularity meant that this year’s Sh’vat would be taking place between Rosh haShanah and Yom Kippur. So Rabbi Ogawa only had a few weeks to prepare her remarks instead of months as she originally thought, and this while she was trying to prepare for the Days of Awe as well.

She had had more peaceful months, in other words.

Still, she had things rather under control, until something entirely unexpected happened.

_Bing_.

“Janet?”

“Hi. Is now a bad time?”

“It depends, is something wrong?” The rabbi could not, for the death of her, figure out why the omniscient neighborhood assistant would need to come to a rabbi, but at this point she had given up trying to predict what the Good Place would throw at her.

“No, nothing’s wrong, I was just wondering. Um. What would the process be like if I wanted to convert?”


End file.
